Prelude to the Round City
Prelude to the Round City extends Alshaibi’s long engagement with landscape, displacement, and the performed body into the terrain of data, scanning, and postwar urban memory. A site-specific installation featuring LiDAR projections, scaffolding, and neon, the work data-maps lived and public spaces across Baghdad’s postwar metropolis and the ancient Mesopotamian Marshes of southern Iraq, near where the artist was born. Conceived in exile and produced over three trips to Iraq, the work unfolds from the position of alienated return: that of a citizen-stranger who can never fully return.
The imagery of Baghdad and the marshes is disorienting and elusive, built from millions of data points that measure the distance and orientation of scanned surfaces. LiDAR produces a form of three-dimensional vision, mapping the surfaces and spatial relations that the laser can reach.. In Prelude to the Round City, this act of scanning Baghdad beyond ordinary sight becomes a way to think through the unstable space between exile and return. The work gathers multiple stamps of time, holding memory as something layered, carried, reassembled, and remade in the psyche.
Standing between the circular projections of LiDAR scans and further enclosed by scaffolding that interrupts the physical structure, a luminous neon outline of a female figure glows. The figure refers to Scheherazade, the heroine-orator and central protagonist of One Thousand and One Nights, who has often been rendered in manuscripts and paintings as the quintessential seductress. Alshaibi’s neon, however, draws from an iconic public artwork on the banks of the Tigris River: Shahrazad and Shahryar Monument, a 1967 bronze sculpture by the late Iraqi artist Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, located in Karrada Park in Baghdad. Hikmat’s sculpture depicts a woman who does not survive through seduction, but through intelligence, language, and creative invention.
Through LiDAR, neon, scaffolding, and projection, Prelude to the Round City appropriates and reanimates symbols associated with Baghdad, including the formal outline of Hikmat’s Scheherazade. The installation is saturated with the material record of daily city life: dense spatial scans, civic monuments, ordinary movement, failing infrastructure, traffic, and fragmented urban surfaces. Against this pressured urban field, sites at the edge of the city and its historical imagination — including the Mesopotamian Marshes and the Malwiya Minaret — emerge as unstable peripheries, part ruin, part memory, part impossible return.
Prelude to the Round City
2023
Multimedia installation: five-channel LiDAR projections, neon, scaffolding, scrim, frame
23 min. 40 sec.
Artist/editor: Sama Alshaibi
Data visualization consultant: Devin Bayly
Data visualization: Sama Alshaibi, Devin Bayly, Karina Buzzi, Ben Kruse
LiDAR consultant: John Buchanan
Research assistants in Iraq: Shawk Ayman and Abdulrahman Zeyad
Researchers and assistants in the USA: Wisam Alshaibi, David Baboila, Karina Buzzi, Mahmood Gladney, and Zakiriya Gladney
Commissioned by Maraya Art Centre, with additional support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Ouster Digital LiDAR, the School of Art, and Arizona Arts at the University of Arizona.